Workout notes: 5 mile run, 3 mile walk.
Run: 20:45 2 mile run on the ‘mill: mile 1 I did 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and then 5 in elevation, then dropped to 0.5 and picked up the speed.

Then to the track for 8 x 200 in lane 2 of the University track: 56, 55, 54, 54, 53, 53, 54, 53 (20:09 via 20:08/20:01) Then a walking lap, then 9:02 for a mile in lane 2.
Then a 3 mile walk outside to get used to the heat (Bradley Park).

Yeah, I know, another GOVERNMENT INTRUSION ON THE FREE MARKET, blah, blah, blah.
Seriously: though we have a basically capitalist system, there is really no such thing as completely free capitalism and, IMHO, nor should there be. The battle will be over HOW MUCH government regulation and intrusion there should be. We fought such battles during President Theodore Roosevelt’s day. And yes, good people can disagree.

I am with the President on this one, though on this issue, I can understand the counter argument. This is one of those issues where I have just a bit of ambivalence.

I ran a 5K (3.25 mile actually; the course is “long”) run this morning; I ran the same race on the same course last year.

The difference: I REMEMBERED that last year was not as cold but windier. I was wrong on BOTH counts when I checked via Weather Underground:

This year (via Weather Underground)

Last year (via Weather Underground)

I think this is what happened this year: this time, I went in knowing the course and expecting that long, difficult stretch toward the end (.8 miles against the wind). And as far as the wind: the winter has sucked almost the entire time, so we are more used to it.

Imagine the following: Mary goes to a fast food place and is very thirsty. She says: please give me the largest cola you have. The worker replies: “Today, there is a special. Our largest size soda is served in a special commemorative cup.”
She replies: “I don’t care about the cup; just give me the largest cola you have.” So she gets her large soda with the special cup.”

Now answer the question: did she intentionally get the commemorative cup?

Now consider the following situation: Mary goes to a fast food place and is very thirsty. She says: please give me the largest cola you have. The worker replies: “We’ve raised the price on the largest size by 1 dollar more than it was yesterday.
She replies: “I don’t care about the extra dollar; just give me the largest cola you have.” So she gets her large soda with the special cup.”

Why? My thought: “in the first situation, the cup was just an extra; she had to put forth no more effort/expense to get it. In the second case, she knew that the drink would cost more but decided that it was worth it.”

But someone with Asperger’s syndrome is likely to answer differently. My guess: to them, both questions are “I want my large drink; both have extra conditions which are irrelevant to wanting the large drink; the type of condition (whether there is a cost or not) is irrelevant. The INTENTION was the size of the drink, period.

Update I thought about this some more. Now let’s change this: this time Mary goes to the store after haven been, say, bitten by a rattlesnake and the store sells anti-venom and it is the ONLY nearby place to get it. The worker says: “we’ll, our anti-venom price just rose by 100 dollars” and Mary says “I don’t care, I need the anti-venom” and pays it.

Did she intentionally pay an extra 100 dollars?

I’d say “no” because I see this sort of “want” as an essential need whereas I see the “largest drink” as a “inessential want”.

A new study using the patterns of Google search queries suggests that mental illnesses flourish in winter and decline in summer.

In both the United States and Australia, researchers found distinct seasonal patterns, high in winter and low in summer, in searches pertaining to anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, depression, suicide, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. The study appears in the May issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Searches related to eating disorders varied the most — 37 percent higher in winter than summer in the United States and 42 percent higher in Australia. The smallest variations were in searches related to anxiety: 7 percent and 15 percent more common in winter than summer in the United States and Australia, respectively. The variations persisted after he researchers controlled for seasonal differences in Internet use, mentions of the diseases in news articles and other factors.

Why this happens, and whether it is connected to increased incidence, is unclear, but it is known that varying hours of daylight, variations in physical activity and seasonal changes in blood levels of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids can affect mood. […]

Extreme natural events, not man-made climate change, led to last summer’s historic drought in the Great Plains, a new federal study said Friday.
Drought occurred in six Plains states between last May and August because moist Gulf of Mexico air “failed to stream northward in late spring,” and summer storms were few and stingy with rainfall, said a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Neither ocean states nor human-induced climate change, factors that can provide long-lead predictability, appeared to play significant roles in causing severe rainfall deficits over the major corn producing regions of central Great Plains,” the report summary said.
The drought in Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota was the worst since record keeping began in 1895, even eclipsing the notorious Dust Bowl droughts of 1934 and 1936, said study leader Martin Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist.

“The event was rare, and we estimated maybe a once in a couple of hundred years event,” Hoerling said. “But for as extreme as it was, it didn’t have any strong indications for early warning.

[…]

“I’m an advocate of global warming because science tells me that greenhouse gases have warmed the planet by about 1 degree Celsius in the last 100 years. So there’s no question about that,” he said. “But the science also tells that every drought that’s occurring isn’t a result of climate change.”

Researchers in Sweden have discovered a clever way to trick partisan voters into switching parties, through the application of a simple survey and some slight of hand.

Exploiting a known defect in human psychology called “choice blindness,” researchers writing for the journal PLoS One got 162 voters to fill out surveys pinpointing their views on key issues like taxes and energy, then covertly switched the survey with one created to show the exact opposite answers. Participants were then confronted on why they gave the faux responses.

What the researchers found is astonishing: A whopping 92 percent of respondents did not catch that their answers were manipulated, and only 22 percent of the switched answers were noticed by participants. During questioning after the survey, 10 percent of the subjects actually switched their preference in political party, while another 19 percent of previously partisan voters said they’d become undecided. […]

Salt may play an important role in autoimmune diseases, according to two new papers published today (March 6) in Nature. Exposure to high levels of salt was found to make both cultured mouse and human T cells more pathogenic, and high-salt diets worsened autoimmune disease in mice.

“I thought the papers were very exciting and provocative,” said John O’Shea, a doctor at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), who wrote a Nature commentary accompanying the new findings and was not involved in the study.

[…]

Meanwhile, David Hafler’s lab at Yale University was coming to similar conclusions from the opposite direction. The group had completed a study where they measured TH17 cells in the blood of healthy human subjects, sequenced the people’s microbiomes, and had them fill out questionnaires about their diets. While the study was supposed to be focused on the influence of the microbiome, the researchers noticed that participants who frequently ate in fast food restaurants had elevated levels of pathogenic TH17 cells. They hypothesized that the saltiness of the food could be part of the explanation.

“That led to a whole series of experiments trying to figure out the role of salt,” Hafler said. Unlike Regev and Kuchroo’s labs, which looked at TH17 differentiation in mouse cells, Hafler’s lab added salt to human cell cultures. They also found that it was associated with more pathogenic TH17 cells. “Salt just seems to trigger all the genes associated with bad autoimmune T cells,” Hafler said.

But the effect hasn’t been proven in humans. There is proof for mice, and some correlation in humans.

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse.

Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries. The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function of a single gene that slows the rapid change in synaptic connections between neurons.

By monitoring the synapses in living mice over weeks and months, Yale researchers have identified the key genetic switch for brain maturation a study released March 6 in the journal Neuron. The Nogo Receptor 1 gene is required to suppress high levels of plasticity in the adolescent brain and create the relatively quiescent levels of plasticity in adulthood. In mice without this gene, juvenile levels of brain plasticity persist throughout adulthood. When researchers blocked the function of this gene in old mice, they reset the old brain to adolescent levels of plasticity.

That would be nice; I’ve found it is harder for me to absorb brand new material, though I have more context for other material.

Nature Cicadas have interesting wings: they have a structure that enables them to kill bacteria by an interesting mechanism:

The veined wing of the clanger cicada kills bacteria solely through its physical structure — one of the first natural surfaces found to do so. An international team of biophysicists has now come up with a detailed model of how this defence works on the nanoscale. The results are published in the latest issue of the Biophysical Journal1.

The clanger cicada (Psaltoda claripennis) is a locust-like insect whose wings are covered by a vast hexagonal array of ‘nanopillars’ — blunted spikes on a similar size scale to bacteria (see video, bottom). When a bacterium settles on the wing surface, its cellular membrane sticks to the surface of the nanopillars and stretches into the crevices between them, where it experiences the most strain. If the membrane is soft enough, it ruptures

1. “If 5 machines in 5 minutes can make 5 widgets, how long will it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?”
2. “A population of lily pads in a pond doubles every day. On day 48, the pond is completely full. On what day was the pond half full?”
3. “A baseball and a baseball bat together costs 110 dollars. The bat costs 100 dollars more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either Rodin’s The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (The Thinker was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.) After seeing the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above the scale’s midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to think.

Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface.

The bottom line: reminding people of thinking (turning on the “logic vs. intuition” switch) immediately made people MORE skeptical.

I admit that I had no trouble at all with this; all Dr. Tyson was saying is that he really isn’t interested in taking part in this debate, so to speak.

Yes, I think a lot about it and I self identify as an atheist (strictly speaking, I am an agnostic atheist with respect to some amorphic “spirit of the universe”, “higher power”, “creative force”, etc. and an “almost gnostic” atheist with regards to the deities that I am aware of (the Hindu ones, the Mormon ones, the Abrahamic deity(s), etc.)

And anyone who thinks that we are here because of naturalistic processes and that there is no direct divine intervention in the universe and that we (the earth and humans) were not the intentional outcome of some plan…well, they are a kindred spirit, IMHO.
I really don’t care about the rest.

We know some things are wrong (e. g., racism) but sometimes, when under stress, we seem to not be able to help ourselves. What gives? This is a Salon article called “The Hidden Brain”; my reading list has gotten even longer.

Fallacies of thinking:there are times when I commit some of these. I am ok at overriding my “natural” distrust of probabilities. But there are times when I make up my mind on emotion and then try to “argue the case” with logic; that is, use logic to reinforce my current opinion. Giving up securely held beliefs is tough. I am good about avoiding some of these.

To keep track of my training. I train for ultramarathons (I usually walk these) and sometimes do running races, bicycle rides and open water swims for variety. My best ultra accomplishment was walking 101 miles in 24 hours in 2004. These days, I walk a marathon every once in a while (5:30 to 7 hours) There was a time when I could run a sub 40 minute 10K (did that once), but that was another lifetime ago; these a days 2427-28 25 minutes for a 5K would be more like it. I also have an off and on interest in yoga and in weight training. My lifetime PB in the bench is 310; currently I do sets of 4 with 175.

From time to time, I post what I am thinking about mathematically

I often post links to science articles, especially articles about cosmology and evolution.

I am very sympathetic to the “new atheist” movement, though some might consider me to be an agnostic. I reject any notion of a deity that interferes with physical events, but remain agnostic to the idea that there might be something “grand and wonderful” (Dawkins’ phrase) outside of our current spacetime continuum.

I am a liberal Democrat who thinks that the current social atmosphere is tilted way too far toward the interests of big business, and I reject the idea that a “free market” cures all ills, though pure socialism doesn’t work either. I am also a believer in the freedom of speech, including speech that I might not like. Also, I’ve been involved (to a moderate degree) with political campaigns, ranging from City Council races up to Presidential races.

Since being targeted by neo-nazis, I’ve started to identify with the anti-racist and the anti-fa movements.

sidebar

My Liberal Identity:

Ollie is a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

Barbara's Liberal Identity:

Barbara is a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. She believes in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.

Created by OnePlusYouBlog Roll Notes
As of March 20, 2010, I went through my longer blogroll and deleted links that no longer work. Be advised that some blogs have not been updated and others have been moved, but you can get to the new address via the old one.
I've read and visited all of these sites at one time or another. However, I've decided to post a separate list of those blogs which I read regularly (some daily, others periodically).
My list of my regular reads
Humor